While the idea of a serverless platform and long running workloads does seem somewhat “unnatural” at first, smart people are already working on that (looking at you @Knative community). In the meantime, a simple approach is sometimes all you may need.

A co-worker recently told me about flic.io buttons. These button caught my attention because they can include triggers for single, double, or hold click and can be easily wired up to all kinds of actions. I instantly thought of of a few really interesting applications.

Next week, April 9–11, Google will be hosting this year’s Cloud Next Conference in San Francisco. The conference is already sold out, but there will be a livestream from keynotes and video available shortly after the sessions. This year, we have a lot of content to share, and I have the privilege of presenting in four sessions — and hope to do at least six live demos.

I had a chance to speak at the Cloud Conf 2019 in Turin, Italy. The conference has double its audience from last year, had a spectacular venue, and large selection of topics. I spoke in the #serverless track on using Knative as a means to serverless where you want it and on your own terms.

I wrote a new post on Google blog on the momentum behind the Knative project. How it the community reached another adoption milestone, doubling the number of its contributors. Also, another data point underscoring the Knative momentum is the month-over-month contributions which have increased over 45% since the 0.

I had an opportunity to keynote at this year’s SpringOne conference in DC on Serverless, Kubernetes, and more specifically Knative. I also covered the great work our open source team at Google been doing, making Spring 1st class citizen on Google Cloud Platform.

Ville and I did a session at Google Cloud Next 2018 in San Francisco. I also published the slides as well as the repo containing all the demos I used in this session in my repo here.

By now, Kubernetes should be the default target for your deployments. Yes, there are still use-cases where Kubernetes is not the optimal choice, but these represent an increasingly smaller number of modern workloads. The main value of Kubernetes is that it greatly abstracts much of the infrastructure management pain.

Google Stackdriver has thousands of build-in metrics to monitor everything from Kubernetes cluster to database or storage. Stackdriver is also not just limited to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), it supports a number of AWS-native services and extensive log monitoring capabilities for a wide array of open source software packages, whether they run in the Cloud or in on premises.

I wanted to use the now generally available Cloud Spanner database to write an app that would track stock prices and social media sentiment to identify potential correlation. To test even the validity of this approach I put together a Go app that subscribes to Twitter stream for all companies defined in the Stocks table and scores each event against the Google NLP API while comparing the user sentiment against the stock ask price against Yahoo API.